Syndicate

Friday, March 13, 2015

A Dodgers spokesperson said the team did not ask Twitter to suspend the account. But curiously, the account was suspended shortly after the Dodgers had a social media team meeting in which, according to one source, Colletti spoke about how he had been harassed on Twitter.

An email to Colletti asking for comment earlier this week was not returned. When reached by phone on Thursday, Colletti angrily inquired how I had gotten his cell phone number. I told him that as a reporter I was pretty good ...

[St. Paul owner Joe Cantillon] claims to have traded [Bill] Hopper for a bird dog, and a few days before reporting for spring ptractice, in his home town, Jackson, Tenn., the pitcher was arrested on a complaint of a neighbor who charged that Hopper had assaulted him.

“Why did you attack the man?” asked the justice of the peace. “He insulted me,” replied Hopper. “What did he say to you?” persisted the guardian of the law. “Say!” shouted Hopper, almost beside ...

As a side note, this might be one of the best “interview” teams Chicago has seen in a long time. From Miguel Montero—the catcher will almost certainly be the first to lose it if things go bad—to Dexter Fowler to Ross to newcomer Phil Coke, we won’t be hard-pressed to find a good quote.

There is another general manager centered book coming out. This one is about Sandy Alderson and his trial and tribulations at running one of the lowest payrolls in the biggest market.

“I’d been working on this book for nearly four years when I suddenly found myself wondering: Why was Alderson cooperating?”, Kettmann writes on page 331. “Part of the answer was simply that I’d asked him at the right time, just as the Former state charities bureau regulator was taking over as Mets GM. ... Then, ...

Thursday, March 12, 2015

If Pablo Sandoval’s recent comments were meant to sting, they did not penetrate. They were comically weak, brushed aside in the clubhouse like a passing whiff of flatulence. The only real issue was his motivation.

The premise is simple: Which team will win more games, Team A or Team B? In each pairing, the teams are in the same city or same state. The idea came to me one day when I started thinking, “OK, which club will be better, the Mets or Yankees?

So what can we conclude? Being a best-shaper isn’t a magic bullet, but it’s not necessarily as meaningless as the reflexive jokes suggest. BSOHL position players don’t hit any better than expected, but they do tend to beat their playing-time projections and potentially play better on defense. BSOHL pitchers, meanwhile, seem to enjoy a genuine advantage. By the standards of most stories out of spring training, that makes being in better shape big news.

[John] Peters did not want to go to Detroit this year. His objection to Detroit was that it was a major league city.
...
[Peters] admits that he can throw as few men can, and a comparison of his own .307 average and the swatting marks claimed by the majority of catchers, has convinced him that he need not worry about his hitting. But he doesn’t know baseball yet, knows that he doesn’t know the game, and doesn’t care to palm himself off as a wise guy.

Wishful thinking. Knowing who was on the mound, Wednesday must have felt like looking down the barrel of a gun for the Marlins—from the wrong end. Harvey being Harvey, most of the attention focused on the Mets’ recovering ace. Truth be told, Syndergaard made even more of an impression, maybe because the Marlins previously were unfamiliar with the 6-6 blond giant who threw “thunderbolts.”

That was more appropriate than the Marlins even realized given Syndergaard’s “Thor” moniker—it hasn’t ...

Pitch sequencing – or how a pitcher approaches a hitter or multiple hitters by linking different types of pitchers in an intentional order – is believed to be very important, and the QOP system ignores it, considering its dependence on context inconsistent with the model.

Fernandez was due to throw 24 hours later. But only 30 pitches (no breaking stuff) from a bullpen mound. His surgery was May 16. Marlins general manager Dan Jennings mentioned he has never seen anyone in his 28 years in pro ball attack rehab like Fernandez has, and the blueprint has Fernandez back in the majors sometime from mid-June to mid-July.

Jered Weaver’s fastball averaged 86.8 mph last season, when he went 18-9 with a 3.28 earned-run average, but even by his standards, his velocity is down this spring. The right-hander ranged from 82-84 mph and hit 85 mph twice in a three-inning, two-run, five-hit effort. “How many velocity questions are we going to have?” Weaver said in response to his first velocity question of the spring. “I don’t pay attention to velocity. It’s more about getting location down and being able to get on pitches ...

Facing Hiroshima ace Kenta Maeda today, 19-year-old Nippon-Ham Fighters righthander Shohei Otani held the Carp to one run over five innings, striking out 10 with no walks while hitting 99 mph. Otani’s fastball was overpowering, sitting at 94-98 mph and hitting the upper end of that range consistently. His lone run allowed came on a hanging slider to Brad Eldred, who crushed Otani’s mistake for a home run.

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

The overview
The challenge for the Red Sox now is to find the best way to turn some of their position-player surplus into pitching. They bet heavily on Sandoval, Ramirez and Moncada in a way other teams wouldn’t dream of because of the uncertainty involved.—Buster Olney

The dilemma
The Red Sox still lack a true top-of-rotation starter; having one would make them the favorite to represent the American League in the World Series once again. So far they’ve been reluctant to ...

I’m not sold on Syndergaard, especially this year. After watching him get visibly flustered the other day, it might be a good idea for him to deal with the tough pitching environment of Las Vegas a little longer. On the other hand I’ve been impressed with Carlos Rodon. I look forward to watching him pitch a little more this spring.

Saving the best for last, the 22-year-old Syndergaard was ranked right around the tenth-best prospect in baseball by BA (11), MLB.com (10) and BP (9) coming into this ...

Some good stuff from Ben Lindbergh. This is just one tidbit. Read the whole thing.

The AL is a prognosticator’s nightmare. As Phil Birnbaum and Neil Paine have noted, there’s an absolute limit to the accuracy of baseball projections. Even if we were omniscient when it came to team talent levels, we wouldn’t be able to predict luck. And luck has large effects: As Birnbaum wrote, “On average, nine teams per season will be lucky by six wins or more.” So what do we do with a division like ...

They may as well give the guy a little time. As the writer notes, it’s not like the D’Backs have much of a chance of making the playoffs anyway. From what I’ve seen and read so far, Tomas has not been pretty.

It was never likely that Tomas was going to stick at third, and while it’s far, far too premature to call it done, little we’ve seen so far indicates that the initial scouting reports were wrong. If he ends up in the outfield, what the Diamondbacks might have is a powerful righty hitter ...

Beals Becker, who is a member of the squad of sluggers of the Phillies, has a glove which looks as if it were the second cousin to an aligator [sic] hide. This glove resembles one of the relics from Noah’s Ark, if there are such in existence. The glove is discolored and it has a weakened appearance, as though it had laid out on the grass many nights.
...
In the middle of the glove there is a good sized hole cut, for Becker, like many other players, believes it ...

If the entire world revolved around Josh Hamilton I would agree. All of us, including addicts, have responsibility for our actions. Although I hope Josh Hamiltion gets control over his addiction and MLB and the public are supportive of his efforts, it’s just not true that the issue is just about Josh Hamilton.

The Josh Hamilton case should be about his addiction and only his addiction. It’s what anybody fighting substance abuse deserves: The ability to remain sober with as few distractions as ...